Sylvia Plath Depression Quotes

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I’ll never speak to God again.

I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

LADY LAZARUS I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?-- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot-- The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: 'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart-- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash-- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. -- written 23-29 October 1962

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)

That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that." I looked at her. "Like what?" "Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.

Forget about the scant hours in her brief life when Sylvia Plath was able to produce the works in Ariel. Forget about that tiny bit of time and just remember the days that spanned into years when she could not move, couldn’t think straight, could only lie in wait in a hospital bed, hoping for the relief that electroconvulsive therapy would bring. Don’t think of the striking on-screen picture, the mental movie you create of the pretty young woman being wheeled on the gurney to get her shock treatments, and don’t think of the psychedelic, photonegative image of this sane woman at the moment she receives that bolt of electricity. Think, instead, of the girl herself, of the way she must have felt right then, of the way no amount of great poetry and fascination and fame could make the pain she felt at that moment worth suffering. Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes a its by-product.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses. --from "Three Women", written March 1962

My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow?

This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.

We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

The silence depressed me. It was not the silence of silence it was my own silence.

And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression.

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

The eyes and the faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.

Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, "erotic" way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. "When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about," Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled "Wanting to Die," in which these startlingly informative lines appear: But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. When, in the opening of "Lady Lazarus," Plath triumphantly exclaims, "I have done it again," and, later in the poem, writes, Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call, we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder.

I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet. “They’re cool,” he explained, “and my mother says they wash easily.” Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed. Buddy seemed hurt I didn’t say anything.

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so wrong and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

It was the day after Christmas and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less!—and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

The reason why I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

Cliff says Sylvia Plath's work is very depressing to read, and that his own daughter had recently suffered through The Bell Jar because she is taking an American literature course at Eastern High School. "And you didn't complain to administration?" I asked. "About what?" "About your daughter being forced to read such depressing stories." "No. Of course not. Why would I?" "Because the novel teaches kids to be pessimistic. No hope at the end, no silver lining. Teenagers should be taught that--" "Life is hard, Pat, and children have to be told how hard life can be." "Why?" "So they will be sympathetic to others. So they will understand that some people have it harder than they do and that a trip through this world can be a wildly different experience, depending on what chemicals are raging through one's mind.

Poppies in July Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns. And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! There are fumes that I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules? If I could bleed, or sleep! If my mouth could marry a hurt like that! Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling. But colorless. Colorless.

Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.

Then he just stood there [naked] in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

My drink was wet and depressing. Each time I took another sip it tasted more and more like dead water

My drink was wet and depressing. Each time I took another sip it tasted more and more like dead water.

Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

Io sono il presente, ma so che anch'io me ne andrò. L'instante sublime, la fiamma che consuma arriva e subito scompare: sabbie mobili, semore. E io non voglio morire.

I deserve a year, two years, to live my own self into being.” Depressing

এই রক্ত-ঝাপটই কবিতা একে থামাবার পথ নেই কাঠের বাসায় সূর্যের মৃত গন্ধ মাটি জমাট বেঁধে আছে, বিশাল নুনে চোবানো প্রান্তর একবার কেউ ঈশ্বরকে দেখে ফেললে, পরিত্রাণ কিসে ?

People or stars Regards me sadly, I disappoint them.

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which "rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future". That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.

I gathered all my news of Joan into a little, bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.

What was there about us, in Belize [asylum], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything. ... Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

Ho talmente riempito la mia riserva di giorni e maschere che adesso posso e devo passare gli anni a pescare, a tirar su mostri dagli occhi di perla, coriacei, squamosi e con barbe marine, sommersi da lungo tempo nel mar dei Sargassi della mia immaginazione.

If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because whenever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok-- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself. Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the Five and Ten. And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.

got depressed with the ending on Tuesday: four pages of anti-climactic question and answer between Doctor and Sara, dry and chopped logical as an adding machine: now, you’ve decided this, how do you feel about that. Bad as a rich involved poem with a bare flat two-line moral tacked on the end: this is the truth kiddies,

we overheard one girl say to another: “Betsy is depressed today.” It seems almost an incredible relief to know that there is someone outside oneself who is not happy all the time. We must be at low ebb when we are this far into the black: that everyone else, merely because they are “other”, is invulnerable. That is a damn lie.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are but where we want to go and all that. 'Is there no way out of the mind?' Sylvia Plath famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it means, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager n a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn't death itself, then the exit route is through books. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give is the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one with firmer foundations and very often a better view.

Quando infine trovi qualcuno in cui senti di poter riversare la tua anima, ti blocchi di colpo davanti alle tue stesse parole - le hai tenute dentro così a lungo, contratte nel buio, che sono ormai sbiadite, brutte, banali, fiacche. Sì, c'è l'allegria, l'autorealizzazione, lo stare insieme: ma la solitudine dell'anima, nella sua spaventosa consapevolezza, è insopportabile, soverchiante.

è come sollevara una campana di vetro posta sopra una comunità dove tutto funziona come un meccanismo oliato, e vedere i minuscoli, indaffarati abitanti arrestarsi di colpo, boccheggiare, gonfiarsi e librarsi nell'aflusso ( anzi, nel deflusso) della rarefatta atmosfera della norma: poveri esserini spaventati che agitano le braccia impotenti nell'aria indecisa. è così che ci sente a liberarsi dalla routine.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

My Mother They are killing her again. She said she did it One year in every ten, But they do it annually, or weekly, Some even do it daily, Carrying her death around in their heads And practicing it. She saves them The trouble of their own; They can die through her Without ever making The decision. My buried mother Is up-dug for repeat performances. Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children. Then It can be rewound So they can watch her die Right from the beginning again. The peanut eaters, entertained At my mother’s death, will go home, Each carrying their memory of her, Lifeless – a souvenir. Maybe they’ll buy the video. Watching someone on TV Means all they have to do Is press ‘pause’ If they want to boil a kettle, While my mother holds her breath on screen To finish dying after tea. The filmmakers have collected The body parts, They want me to see. They require dressings to cover the joins And disguise the prosthetics In their remake of my mother; They want to use her poetry As stitching and sutures To give it credibility. They think I should love it – Having her back again, they think I should give them my mother’s words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll, Who will walk and talk And die at will, And die, and die And forever be dying.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream I remembered everything. I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree an Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull. Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

টিউলিপ ফুলগুলো বেশ উত্তেজক, এখন এখানে শীতকাল । দ্যাখো সবকিছু কেমন ধবধবে, কতো শান্ত, কতো তুষার ঝরেছে । আমি শান্তিময়তা শিখছি, নিজের পাশে শুয়ে আছি চুপচাপ আলো যেমন ছেয়ে আছে দেয়ালের গায়ে, এই বিছানায়, দুই হাতে । আমি কেউ নই ; বিস্ফোরণ নিয়ে আমার কিছু করবার নেই । আমি আমার নাম আর রোজকার পোশাক নার্সদের বিলিয়ে দিয়েছি আর আমার ইতিহাস দিয়েছি অনুভূতি-নাশককে দেহ শল্যচিকিৎসকদের । ওরা আমার মাথা বালিশ আর চাদরের মাঝে তুলে রেখেছে দুই শাদা পাতার তলায় একটা চোখের মতো যা বন্ধ হবে না । মূর্খ চোখের তারা, ওকে সবকিছু নিজের ভেতরে পুরে নিতে হবে নার্সরা পাশ দিয়ে যায় আর যায়, তারা সমস্যা নয় কোনো, শাদা টুপি-পরা শঙ্খচিলের মতো ডাঙায় উড়ে চলে যায় তারা হাত দিয়ে নিজেদের কাজ করে, একজন হুবহু আরেকজনের মতন, তাই বলা অসম্ভব ওরা সবসুদ্ধ মিলে কতোজন । ওদের কাছে আমার দেহ একটা নুড়ি, জলের মতন শুশ্রুষা করে ওপর দিয়ে বয়ে যাবে এমন ভাবে শুশ্রুষা করে, আস্তে পালিশ করে । ওদের উজ্বল ছুঁচ আমায় অসাড়তা এনে দেয়, ঘুমও পাড়িয়ে দেয় । এখন আমি নিজেকে হারিয়ে ফেলেছি ভার সামাল দিতে বিরক্ত---- আমার রাতভরের পালিশ-করা চামড়ার বাক্স যেন ওষুধের গুলি রাখার ডিবে, পারিবারিক ফোটো থেকে আমার স্বামী আর বাচ্চা হাসছে ; ওদের হাসি আমার ত্বকে বসে যায়, ছোটোছোটো হাসিমুখ বঁড়শি । আমি সবকিছু ফসকে যেতে দিয়েছি, তিরিশ বছরের মালটানা নৌকা আমার নাম আর ঠিকানায় একগুঁয়ে হয়ে ঝুলছে । আমার স্নেহের সম্পর্কগুলোকে ওরা ধুয়েমুছে সাফ করে দিয়েছে । ভীত আর নগ্ন সবুজ প্লা্টিক-বালিশ ট্রলি থেকে আমি আমার টি-সেট, লিনেনের থাক, আমার বইগুলোকে দেখলুম দৃষ্টির বাইরে উধাও হয়ে যাচ্ছে, আর জল আমার মাথার ওপর দিয়ে বয়ে গেলো । আমি এখন একজন নান, এর আগে আমি এতো পবিত্র হইনি । আমি কোনো রকমের ফুল চাইনি, কেবল চেয়েছিলাম দুই হাত ছড়িয়ে শুয়ে থাকতে আর পুরো নিরুদ্বেগ । এটা কতো স্বাধীন, তোমার ধারণা নেই কতোটা স্বাধীন--- শান্তিময়তা এতো বিশাল যে তা তোমায় হতবুদ্ধি করে দেবে, আর তা কোনো প্রশ্ন তোলে না, একটা নামের ট্যাগ, কয়েকটা তুচ্ছ গয়না । এটাই মৃতদের কাছাকাছি পৌঁছোয়, শেষ পর্যন্ত ; আমি তাদের কল্পনা করি এর ওপরে তাদের মুখ বন্ধ করে দিই, খ্রিস্টদীক্ষার বড়ির মতন । প্রথমত টিউলিপফুল বড়ো বেশি লাল, আমাকে বিক্ষত করে ওরা। এমনকি উপহারের কাগজের ভেতর থেকে ওদের শ্বাস শুনতে পাই মৃদুমন্দ, তাদের বাঁধা শাদা ফিতে থেকে বেরিয়ে, এক বিরক্তিকর শিশুর মতন । ওদের লালরঙ আমার জখমের সঙ্গে কথা বলে, আলাপ করে । তারা বেশ তনুকৃত : যেন ভেসে যায়, তবু আমাকে বিদ্ধস্ত রাখে ওরা, তাদের আকস্মিক জিভ আর রঙ দিয়ে আমাকে বিপর্যস্ত করে, আমার গলাকে ঘিরে ছিপের সুতায় বাঁধা লালরঙ সীসার সীতাহার । আমায় লক্ষ করেনি কেউ আগে, এখন লক্ষ রাখা হচ্ছে আমাকে । টিউলিপগুলো তাকায় আমার দিকে, আমার পেছনে জানালার দিকে যেখানে দিনে একবার আলো মন্হরভাবে নিজেকে ছড়ায় আর ক্ষীণ হয়ে যায়, এবং নিজেকে চেয়ে দেখি আমি, হাস্যকর, এক কাগজ-কাটা ছায়া সূর্যের চোখ আর টিউলিপের চোখগুলোর মাঝে, আর আমার মুখশ্রী তো নেই, আমি নিজেকে মুছে ফেলতে চেয়েছি । প্রাণবন্ত টিউলিপগুলো আমার অক্সিজেন শুষে নেয় । ওদের আসার আগে বাতাস যথেষ্ট শান্ত ছিল, আসা আর যাওয়া, শ্বাসের পর শ্বাসে, হইচইহীন । তারপর টিউলিপগুলো তাদের ভরে তুললো তীব্র আওয়াজে । এখন তাদের চারিপাশে বাতাস থম মেরে থাকে আর ঘুরে-ঘুরে চলে যেন কোনো নদী জলের তলায় মরচে পড়া লালরঙা ইঞ্জিন ঘিরে থম মারে ঘিরে পাক খায় । ওরা আমার মনোযোগ একাগ্র করে, তা ছিল বেশ সুখের খেলছিল বিশ্রাম নিচ্ছিল আত্মসমর্পণহীন । দেয়ালগুলোও, নিজেদের উষ্ণ করে নিচ্ছে মনে হয় । টিউলিপগুলোকে খাঁচায় পোরা দরকার ছিল ভয়ঙ্কর জন্তুর মতো ; আফ্রিকার বিশাল সিংহের মতো মুখ খুলছে ওরা, আর আমি আমার হৃদয় সম্পর্কে সচেতন : তা খোলে আর বন্ধ হয় স্রেফ আমাকে ভালোবাসার জন্যই তার লালরঙা পাত্র মঞ্জরিত হয় । যে জলের স্বাদ নিই তা গরম ও নোনতা, সমুদ্রের মতন, আর স্বাস্হ্যের মতন এক বহুদূর দেশ থেকে আসে ।

My adolescent years were convoluted with ideas that chaos was good, that depression meant you were a creative person. My heroes were Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Nancy Spungen. Sylvia fucking Plath… playing Russian roulette with various dicks to make a point that I just didn’t fucking care. I was a mess. I was interesting.

We cannot know for sure whether Plath's original order in "Ariel" was meant to suggest a narrative of recovery from anger, depression, and self-punishment. But her placement of "wintering" at the collection's end hints that she believed she was becoming more resilient, and that she may have began, before her own death, to forgive her father for dying.

I will not let myself get sick, go mad or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else's shoulder. Masks are the order of the day-and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.

And I’m starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath who are just better off dead, who may live in that bare, minimal sort of way for a certain number of years, may even marry, have kids, create an artistic legacy of sorts, may even be beautiful and enchanting at moments, as both of them supposedly were. But in the end, none of the good was any match for the aching, enduring, suicidal pain. Perhaps I, too, will die young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven. Scrunched up and crying here on a Saturday night, I can see no other way.

Sylvia Plath's achingly powerful The Bell Jar weaves her personal battle with depression into the tapestry of fiction. Ned Vizzini's best-selling It's Kind of a Funny Story was inspired by his own psychiatric hospitalization. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, contains